The history of modern tourism began on 5 July 1841, when a train carrying 500 factory workers travelled from
This modest excursion was organized by Thomas Cook, a young man with neither money nor formal
were caused by widespread alcoholism. Travel, he believed, would broaden the mind and distract people from
drinking.
The success of Cook’s first excursion led to others, and the success of business was phenomenal. In 1851,
travel magazine; by 1872, the newsletter was selling 100,000 copies a month and its founder was treated as a
When Thomas Cook reached the age of sixty-three, there was one challenge ahead of him: to travel around the
otherwise. In 1869 two things happened that would make an overland journey possible: the opening of Suez
Canal and the completion of a railroad network that linked the continent of America from coast to coast.
by its open carriages, sleeping cars, on-board toilets and efficient baggage handling, he was shocked that men
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Japan delighted him. It was a land of ‘great beauty and fertility’, where the hotel served ‘the best roast beef we
have tasted since we left England’. Cook and his party toured the city od Yokohama in a caravan of rickshaws.
‘We created quite a sensation’ he wrote.
Cook’s love of Japan was equaled only by his hatred of China. Shanghai, the next port of call, offered ‘narrow
and filthy streets’ which were full of ‘pestering and festering beggars. After 24 hours there, Cook had seen
enough.
He travelled to Singapore and as his set off across the Bay of Bengal, Cook was full of confident, feeling that
he understood ‘this business of pleasure’. But nothing he had seen in Shanghai could have prepared him for
the culture shock of India.
‘At the holy city of Benares, we were conducted through centers of filth and obscenity’, he wrote. From the
deck of a boat on a Ganges he saw the people washing dead bodies, before burning them on funeral piles
beside the river. He found these scenes ‘revolting in the extreme’.
By the time Cook left Bombay for Egypt, he was showing sign of tiredness. On 15 February 1873, while
crossing the Red Sea, he wrote to
The Times that he would not travel around the world again. ‘After thirty-two
years of travelling, with the view of making travelling easy, cheap and safe for others, I ought to rest.’ In
Cairo, he fell seriously ill for the first time.
Cook arrived home in England after 222 days abroad. Although he never tempted another world tour, he
continued to escort
parties of tourists to continental Europe throughout the 1870s, and did not cease his
seasonal visits to Egypt until the late 1880s. He died in July 1892 at the age of eighty-three.
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